Connie Burczyk is an unlikely savior.
The St. Cloud, Minn., woman has multiple sclerosis, a fractured ankle, and little swimming ability. But as she walked with her friend, Kathy Maloney, on Friday and encountered a person in distress, none of that mattered.
While the two meandered along the Mississippi river with their dogs, reports the St. Cloud Times, Burczyk heard someone struggling in the water, crying for help.
"We thought it might just be somebody joking... It was so dark we could barely see,” Maloney told the paper.
So Burczyk left her dog with her friend, hobbled toward the riverbank on her injured ankle, and waded into the icy water.
Then she found an unnamed man fighting against hypothermia and pulled him to shore, reports MinnPost.
"By the time we found him, his hands were already blue," Maloney said. "It was a miracle that it happened the way it did because that man would have froze to death or drowned."
The St. Cloud Fire Department confirmed to The HuffPost the man faced serious hypothermia had it not been for the rescue. "They are two incredible women who answered the call to help another person," added St. Cloud Battalion Chief Greg Newinski in an email.
The man was transported to the St. Cloud Hospital and is recovering.
Burczyk is just the latest unlikely hero to make headlines. In September, a partially paralyzed woman is credited with flinging herself out of her wheelchair and into a swimming pool to save a 70 year-old man.
According to The Daily Mail, she kept his head above water until an attendant was able to lift him entirely out of the pool.